The Price of the Surge

Steven Simon

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

Summary:  The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director for Transnational Threats.

Bush tried to allay these worries, pledging to, among other things, increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps and boost defense spending. But the Joint Chiefs also conditioned their reluctant support of the surge on a promise from the president to hold Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's feet to the fire on political reconciliation. So when Bush unveiled his surge strategy in January 2007 (the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops, through September, with the initial military objective of restoring order to Baghdad), the stated purpose was to ensure that "the [Iraqi] government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq's Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace -- and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible." Bush quoted Maliki's promise that the Baghdad security plan would "not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of their sectarian or political affiliation."

Even then, however, the administration was already starting to doubt Maliki's competence and willingness to pursue reconciliation, the principal determinant of long-term stability in Iraq. Two months earlier, Hadley had visited Iraq to assess the prospects for a cross-sectarian political rapprochement and come away unsure of Maliki's stance. "Do we and Prime Minister Maliki," Hadley had wondered in his December 2006 memo, "share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq." Hadley proposed several ways to test Maliki's intentions and bolster his resolve, including initiatives to rejigger parliamentary support to free Maliki from his Shiite base linked to Muqtada al-Sadr and enable him to take conciliatory steps toward the Sunnis. The United States, however, lacked the influence necessary to put this approach into practice. Before long, events in Iraq revealed the answers to Hadley's questions: in both cases, a resounding no.

The deployment of the five new brigades proceeded more or less as planned, but from the start there was little headway made toward the broader goals of the surge, particularly reconciliation, as measured by the Iraqi government's inability to meet key benchmarks. The Constitutional Review Committee, which was charged with redressing Sunni grievances, made little progress, and there was no progress on de-Baathification reform, amnesty, provincial elections, or the implementation of oil legislation. The Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front had walked away from Maliki's cabinet, and Bush's reportedly regular calls to Maliki urging him to mobilize his government were ineffective. The Iraqi committees created to support the Baghdad security plan were left unfilled, and the three Iraqi brigades needed to help implement it arrived late and understrength. Diplomatic efforts to get Iraq's neighbors involved fizzled.

FROM TOP DOWN TO BOTTOM UP

The president's hopes for the top-down political efforts that were supposed to accompany the surge quickly faded. As a substitute, however, a new bottom-up strategy was embraced. Bush had observed in his January surge speech that the Sunnis were challenging al Qaeda's presence in Iraq, and a February 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq recommended "deputizing, resourcing, and working more directly with neighborhood watch groups and establishing grievance committees -- to help mend frayed relationships between tribal and religious groups, which have been mobilized into communal warfare over the past three years." A few months later, the president signaled a formal shift in strategy in a speech at the Naval War College: "To evaluate how life is improving for the Iraqis, we cannot look at the country only from the top down. We need to go beyond the Green Zone and look at Iraq from bottom up. This is where political reconciliation matters the most, because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support new Iraq or to sit on the fence, uncertain about the country's future." What the president was proposing was a shift in the U.S. approach to counterinsurgency. Now, the United States would work to exploit a grass-roots anti-al Qaeda movement already under way by taking the pressure off the insurgents who had begun to point their weapons at the jihadists and funneling money to tribal leaders. In theory, this would help dismantle the jihadist infrastructure and create islands of stability that would eventually join up like "oil spots."

After the U.S. invasion, the Sunni groups that would go on to make up the insurgency arrived at a marriage of convenience with the foreign and local jihadists who made up al Qaeda in Iraq. The two shared a common goal: to reverse the triumph of the Shiites and restore the Sunnis to their lost position of power. For the Sunni insurgents, the presence of foreign jihadists also helped divert the attention of U.S. forces. Up to a point, therefore, al Qaeda's excesses -- such as its attempt to impose strict Wahhabi-style rule by banning music and satellite dishes and compelling women to cover themselves entirely -- were to be tolerated.

But for al Qaeda, the link with the insurgents was supposed to serve two additional purposes that went well beyond the shared goal of chipping away at Shiite predominance -- and ultimately went against the interests of the Iraqi Sunnis themselves. The first was to establish an al Qaeda-dominated ministate as a base for carrying out jihad against enemies outside of Iraq. (The November 2005 attack against three Western tourist hotels in Amman, Jordan, allegedly ordered by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was a harbinger of this wider strategy.) The second was to seize a leading position within the insurgency and thereby block a power-sharing arrangement between Baghdad and the Sunni nationalists, an arrangement that would entail the selling out of al Qaeda by the Sunnis.

The Iraqi Sunnis' enthusiasm for the alliance waned as al Qaeda increasingly attempted to assert its leadership. In October 2006, al Qaeda declared the formation of an Islamic state in Iraq, demanding that Sunni insurgent leaders pledge allegiance to the new (and many believed fictional) jihadist commander Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, whose name was supposed to signify an authentically Iraqi origin. To the nationalist insurgents, accepting the declaration of a separate state and ceding leadership to al Qaeda made little sense. Doing so would have fueled the process of decentralization, emboldened those Kurds and Shiites who sought their own fiefdoms, and, crucially, further distanced the Sunnis from eventual access to Iraq's potentially massive oil revenues. Moreover, despite the spectacular successes that had been attributed to al Qaeda, it was the nationalist Sunnis who provided the backbone of the insurgency and had done most of the killing and dying.

Some tribes had also grown increasingly resentful of al Qaeda's efforts to seize control of resources. The Albu Risha tribe, for example, had lost control over portions of the road from Baghdad to Amman, undermining its ability to raise revenue by taxing or extorting traders and travelers. When the Albu Rishas' leaders protested, the chieftain, Sheik Bazi al-Rishawi, was killed along with one of his sons, and two more of his sons were abducted. In response, Rishawi's fourth son, Sheik Abdul Sattar, assembled a small group of tribal figures (with the help of funds from the local U.S. military commander) under the banner of the Anbar Salvation Council to roll back al Qaeda's influence. The bodies of al Qaeda personnel soon began turning up in alleyways.